#461 Depresso-bot

Some depression is triggered by the boomerang effect. Kind of like the caffeine withdrawal headache. Caffeine makes your blood vessels smaller and you blood run faster. Notches up your metabolism. Your system adapts. Take away the caffeine and blood vessels expand again. In the area of your cranium, that causes a headache. Some say there’s a bit of a boomerang effect with the mood elevation element of caffeine as well. What goes up must come down, spinning wheels spinning round, and all that blood sweat and tears stuff. The elation is countered by depression. Yin and yang, black and white—espresso and depresso. Speaking of depression, the super bowl is over. And with it the controversy over its many ads. The mystique of the super bowl ad has become huge. For the entire rest of the year remotes are poised in hand, ready to rub out a commercial from perception with the simple twitch of a thumb. But at the super bowl people actually tune in for the commercials. I was at a big party and when the game was on people were loud, raucous, and talking away merrily. But when the commercials came on people started shushing each other. Everyone stared raptly at the TV, savoring every nuance of Madison Avenue at its supposed best. After the game the post game analysis started. America rolled the super bowl experience around in its mouth like a jaded wine taster, sniffed, snorted and spit out the backwash. Chicago’s performance was a letdown or expected, Prince’s performance was great or he was a shadow of his former self. And this commercial or that scored big time or missed the field goal by inches. One of the commercials that was controversial was the depressed robot. In case you didn’t see it, it went like this. A line robot in a car factory misses screwing in a bolt. His human supervisor summarily fires him. He roams the streets, tries his luck in a series of dead end jobs, fails some more, ends up homeless and in despair and is finally shown on a bridge obviously ready to jump off and commit suicide. The scene changes and it’s all a bad robot dream. The most vocal reactions to the commercial came from the mental health professionals and the suicide prevention folk. Suicide is not funny, they said. What surprised me was that no one picked up the excruciating irony of the whole thing. That same tragedy: losing your high paying job, being forced to work two dead end jobs to make ends meet, scraping to pay your bills, losing all your savings to a medical emergency because you no longer have union benefits, finally ready to jump off a bridge in despair, all of these things were the same things that thousands and thousands of human workers faced when they were cast out in the street and replaced by, yep, the same type of robot depicted in this ad. Spinning wheels, spinning round. Watch out for the needle Sleeping Beauty.
America, ya gotta love it